In any healthcare setting, accuracy is a top priority. Nowhere is this more critical than in pharmacies, where medication errors can have serious consequences for patient safety and regulatory compliance.
Despite best intentions, mistakes happen. In the U.S. alone, there are approximately 51.5 million prescription errors each year — that’s about 141,000 errors every single day1.
Whether medication is expired or dispensed to the wrong patient, pharmacists must do everything possible to reduce and prevent these mistakes. Fortunately, modern technology that’s purpose-built for the pharmacy space can significantly improve medication dispense accuracy and safeguard patient health.
4 Common Medication Safety Issues
To stop medication errors in their tracks, it’s crucial to understand their root causes. The following are a few of the main culprits behind these costly – and potentially deadly – mistakes:
- Inadequate Identity Verification. Manual identity checks can be prone to mistakes, such as busy pharmacy staff skimming identity credentials and misreading crucial details or forgetting to check identity altogether. Inadequate identification verification can lead to medication mix-ups whether accidental or due to intentional identity fraud.
- Lack of Safeguards. Even if pharmacy staff conducts thorough identity verification, there’s still the risk of medication having been incorrectly bagged or the wrong script being grabbed by mistake. Without a second line of defense, these errors are much more likely to go unnoticed. This is especially common in understaffed pharmacies where there’s always a line of waiting patients and the checkout process is overly manual.
- Lack of Inventory Management. Manual inventory tracking doesn’t allow pharmacy staff to see stock levels in real time, leading to stockouts or overstocking. Overstock can directly impact medication errors since it can lead to expired medications being dispensed. Stockouts, on the other hand, may not cause prescription errors but still impact patient health since customers aren’t able to purchase the medications they need when they need them.
- System Downtime. Frequent system downtimes disrupt pharmacy operations, delay service, and increase the risk of human error. When downtime occurs, stressed out pharmacy staff is
nforced to resort to manual processes, which are more prone to mistakes. Without the ability to use digital technology safety checks, such as automated identity verification, there’s a greater risk of mix-ups.
5 Tips for Preventing Medication Errors in Pharmacies
While the above issues are common and can have serious regulatory and patient safety implications, they’re also relatively simple to solve. Fortunately, digital technologies purpose-built for pharmacies have advanced leaps and bounds over the past few years, offering an extra layer of protection against the most common medication safety issues.
Here are five steps that you can take to increase patient safety and reduce risk:
- Implement Digital Identity Verification. Using systems with built-in identity verification can safeguard against mistakes or user error. A purpose-built pharmacy point-of-sale (POS) system will require pharmacists to input and verify details such as date of birth (or will even capture credentials digitally for them) before they can complete a transaction. Additionally, if an Rx bag is scanned and it belongs to a family member with the same last name, the POS will alert the pharmacy staff that it’s not for the patient standing in front of them. The technician and customer can then verify that the customer is indeed picking up medication for their family member, after which they can proceed with the sale. An added benefit of digital identity verification is the elimination of manual uploading, which speeds up transactions and enhances the audit process.
- Verify Scripts at Bagging and Checkout. Beyond identity verification, pharmacists need to prevent human error when bagging medications, grabbing scripts, and checking out customers. A POS-integrated lighted will-call system requires pharmacists to scan medication labels when initially loading prescriptions into a lighted bag and again at the point of sale. In addition to speeding up the process of locating medications, these systems enhance safety and accuracy by alerting the pharmacist if the script information doesn’t match the selected patient’s details.
- Leverage Intelligent Inventory Solutions. Real-time inventory tracking can prevent stockouts and overstocking, ensuring medications are fresh and available. Look for a POS with retail stocking capabilities that can automatically send alerts when items are running low and should be ordered. As a second line of defense against stockouts, a POS-integrated lighted will-call system can allow a pharmacist to see if specific medications have gone unclaimed so they can return to stock and dispense to a patient in need.
- Prioritize User-Friendly Solutions. Some technologies are so difficult to use that they actually hinder medication safety, making it challenging for staff to enter identity details or complete transactions. POS systems with user-friendly interfaces — backed by robust training programs — can help minimize the learning curve for new staff members and ensure that all team members can quickly adapt to safety protocols. This is especially beneficial for pharmacies that employ rotating staff or students who may work infrequently and need to get up to speed on a system quickly.
- Adopt Reliable Systems. Technology won’t solve medication errors if it’s not online. Look for technology providers with high uptime rates to ensure continuous operations and reliability. All pharmacies — and especially those with mobile medication delivery programs, like curbside, drive-through, or meds to beds — would benefit from cloud-based, mobile POS systems. In addition to better uptime rates, pharmacists can have peace of mind with offline mode, which prevents staff from losing the data and transactions they were working on until they are able to reconnect to Wi-Fi, at which point they can pick up right where they left off.
Emporos Enhances Pharmacy Safety
Medication safety and accuracy is at the core of every pharmacy’s mission – and it should be at the top of your technology vendors’ priority list, too.
At Emporos, we’ve always prioritized building modern, simple, and safe pharmacy commerce solutions. Our user-friendly POS, mobile POS, and POS-integrated lighted will call system, are helping pharmacies significantly reduce medication errors with high uptime, automated safety checks, built-in identity verification, and robust inventory management.
>>> Read about how a cancer treatment outpatient pharmacy reduced medication errors by 95%. <<<
Reach out today to discover how our solutions can help you achieve your medication safety goals and create a safer pharmacy environment for everyone. Schedule a demo here or email us at [email protected].
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